Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Cute Beats Smart - Corporate Working Application?

I love this article! Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart Why? Because of the HUMAN element. Human's assisting a robot to reach its goal. People working WITH technology to get things done. Simplicity in design has always been held as the ideal. But more often then not when applied to technology solutions we don't insert the interaction and interconnection of human behavior in our solutions. Why? Because humans are unpredictable. And in our scientific culture everything must be exact and perfect and...well...explainable...rational...and have some sort of ROI.

Its impossible to explain WHY people helped the little robot reach its goal. But many people did...for many different reasons.

Do we TRUST our employees enough to include them and their behaviors, in our eLearning solutions? Do you trust that you have hired smart people who can manage their time, and participate in life-long learning? Or do you need to put a mandate on everything so that you can enforce compliance, and "get results"?

It certainly helps us sleep at night knowing that you have checked off the line item that ALL employees have been trained on x.y.z skill. But wouldn't you feel much more secure in knowing that your employees have LEARNED and APPLIED x.y.z skill?

I believe new media and web technologies allow us to manage the more fluid nature of learning in ways never before possible. Manage is probably too strong of a word, but i use it to make you "control" types a little more comfortable with the idea of chaos. Learning is messy and a certain level of uncertaintly and chaos is required. Formal, structured, training "events" cannot, by design, encourage and support uncertaintly and chaos.

But maybe there is a new instructional design model, waiting to be defined, that DOES take human behavior into consideration as an important element. Maybe? Here's to hoping its discovered soon.